Wilderness Park

Flooding and erosion as well as seasonal fluctuation in the flow of the streams in the area mean that land that is perfectly dry in midsummer or midwinter becomes completely inundated and impassible in Spring or Fall.

Wildlife in the area includes foxes, deer, raccoons, opossums, frogs, hawks, owls, songbirds, and squirrels, as well as small fish and aquatic invertebrates.

South of Saltillo Rd, Jamaica North connects to the Homestead Trail corridor, which as of July 2012 reaches to Beatrice, Nebraska, and will ultimately extend to Marysville, Kansas.

Shortly thereafter, a settler named Phillip Cooper dammed the Salt Creek to create a pond for the purpose of making ice in the winter.

[4] Some time after this, the land was purchased by the Burlington Railroad to operate Lincoln Park and more importantly to use Salt Creek as a water source for their steam engines.

The railroad pumped roughly one million gallons of water from the Salt Creek through a twelve inch pipe to their roundhouse located southwest of Lincoln.

[4] The first Boy Scouts of America troop formed in Nebraska in 1910, quickly becoming immensely popular, and began meeting in Lincoln Park in 1912.

[4] Concurrently in the late 1890s, a Methodist organization called the Epworth Association sought to bring the "camp meeting" style of retreat popularized at Chautauqua, New York, to Nebraska.

[5] The growing popularity of the park, an average of 3,000 residents at its height, led to the construction of a village of cabins, a 60-room dormitory, and a 150-room hotel, as well as four restaurants, a grocery store, bakery, bookstore, and post office.

Similarly, automobiles meant that families could quickly drive wherever they pleased for relatively low cost and no longer relied on the trains and streetcars which had helped to make Epworth Park thrive.

In 2010, the center of one bridge in the south end of the park collapsed roughly fifteen feet as around 20 children from a day camp were crossing the structure.

[11] The second legend claims that in the early twentieth century, Wilderness Park was a wooded wasteland at the edge of town inhabited by a mysterious old woman.